Why does it take 13 minutes to get through to customer care?

 By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

16 February 2014

There is no question about this: Safaricom is the largest company in Kenya by practically all standards. Latest statistics from the Communications Commission of Kenya (the market regulator) indicate that as of 30th September 2013, the company had 20.8 million subscribers – that’s almost half the population of the country!

Safaricom has 40 billion shares listed at the Nairobi stock exchange currently valued at about Sh12 each making the total market worth of the company about Sh480 billion – about a quarter of the combined value of all listed companies.

Speaking on the Easy FM morning show early this week, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Bob Collymore said that Safaricom has about 1,600 staff at its customer care call centre – the largest such centre in the region. He added that the centre handles about 500,000 calls daily.

However, despite this large number of staff, customers still wait inordinately long before they can speak to some one. Over the last few days, I did a quick experiment: I called the Safaricom customer care number at different times of day and timed how long it took to get a response. The average was about 13 minutes.

Now I also have an Orange Telkom line and I also called the customer care number in my experiment. The average response time was about 10 seconds!

This was quite surprising, so I checked the customer data: the CCK report indicates that Orange Telkom had 2.2 million subscribers as at 30 September 2013. That is about one-tenth the number for Safaricom.

Now it is easy to simply conclude that Orange is able to answer customers’ calls faster because it has fewer subscribers, but that would be rushing to a conclusion. So, I called the company’s Human Resources department and asked how many staff they have at their call centre. The answer was approximately 100.

Let’s stop and pull that information together. Safaricom has 21 million customers and 1,600 call centre staff who take about 13 minutes to pick the phone. Orange Telkom has 2.2 million customers and 100 call centre staff who take 10 seconds to pick the phone.

How can we interpret this?

The best way to compare the two is by working out the number of call centre staff per million subscribers. For Safaricom, this is 1,600 divided by 21; that is, 72 staff per million customers. The ratio for orange comes to 45 (100 divided by 2.2).

In other words, Safaricom has a much higher call centre capacity than Orange. But it still takes much longer to answer a customer’s call. The explanation for this discrepancy is much deeper than just numbers and ratios. I will leave that for Mr. Collymore to mull over.

My parting shot is this: The choice of service provider is complicated. It is not dictated by the speed of the call centre alone. Indeed, I would choose a company where I don’t have to call the customer helpline at all!